Film Ick‘s Brendon Connelly vs. Deadline Hollywood Daily’‘s Nikki Finke over Finke’s dismissal of Eli Roth‘s Hostel, Part II as “disgusting” without (apparently) having seen it.
Connelly is on the right side of the debate, of course. Hostel, Part II may indeed be vile, but it may have striking “whoa” moves at the same time. We all know what the torture-porn game is about and the core psychology driving it, but you have to give the devil (i.e., Roth) his due and watch the damn thing, or at least some of it.
Painful as it sometimes can be, you have to go to a screening (or a public performance) of a given film and sit through 20 to 30 minutes worth before venting an opinion. Obviously not about the entire film but about how those first 20 or 30 minutes were so painful to sit through that you either had to leave or shoot yourself, etc. Life is way, way too short to sit through a godawful movie. I am proud, proud, proud of my early walkouts.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End experienced one of the steepest post-Memorial Day opening drops in Hollywood history, plummeting 62 % for an estimated $43.2 million haul.
Box-Office Mojo’s Brandon Gray reports that the deeply loathed Jerry Bruckheimer-Gore Verbinski pic will “fall well short of” Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest‘s $423.3 million tally by the end of its run. POTC: AWE has earned $216.5 million so far. At the same point, says Gray, POTC: DMC was down 54 % to $62.3 million for a $258.4 million total.
Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up took in roughly $29.3 million on approximately 3,700 screens at 2,871 theaters. It opened on the same date as last summer’s The Break-Up, which took in $39.2 million on the first weekend.

Nellie McKay attempts a reselling of Doris Day — who she was (or seemed to be) on-screen, who she may have been off-screen, the bizarreness of her personality, her weirdly virginal nature — in a 6.3.07 N.Y. Times piece, which I for one am not buying for an instant. I admire Day’s work on behalf of animals, but she always played exceedingly strange women, especially from the mid ’50s on. Try and watch her labored performance in Alfred Hitchcock‘s 1955 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much without wincing.

“You really have to see John Travolta to believe him, especially toward the end of Hairspray when he finally lets loose — dressed in a fat suit as a woman in a red tutu and high heels — and dances up a storm in the film’s finale,” writes Fox 411’s Roger Friedman.
“I don’t know if it’s an Oscar performance, but I do know that when Hairspray is shown in big theaters (I saw it in a screening room, still a little unfinished), audiences are going to go wild with cheers and whistles. Travolta even signals the audience with his now-trademark ‘cat eye’ from Pulp Fiction as he launches like a spinning top onto the stage of the fictional Corny Collins Show. You can only love it. Somehow he brings that old Travolta warmth and charisma to a crazy costume.”

An okay but moderately boring Associated Press piece about franchise directors — Sam Raimi, Gore Verbinksi, Peter Jackson, Paul Greengrass, Tom Shadyac, etc. “Unlike Hollywood in earlier days, when any old director might take on a sequel, the same filmmaker continues to oversee the latest installments of most big franchises out this summer,” etc.

The notion of George Clooney being the new Cary Grant, or even that he’s vaguely Cary Grant-ish, was thin from the get-go. I thought it had been tossed aside, frankly, but now here’s David Thomson kicking it around again. Clooney himself would probably be the last guy to wink at this idea.
The entertainment world is full of tallish, trim, brown-eyed, good-looking, impeccably mannered lady-pleasers, and these superficial traits are nearly all these two men have ever shared, so to speak, save for a knack (a gift in Grant’s case) for playing light comedy and an agreeable way with broad comic gestures — double-takes, eyeball-popping, etc.
The thing that sets Grant apart is that urbane sophisticated Grant persona (i.e., an act that he developed bit by bit in the mid to late 1930s), that classy but almost testy sense of reserve (he always seemed to be masking his deep-down wants and hurts) and that wonderfully crisp and resonant voice, Americanized Bristol accent and all.
Clooney, by contrast, always seems to play a fairly open-minded good egg, confused or offended at times but generally smooth and amiable, open to all queries and opinions, etc. He doesn’t ever seem to duck or hide from anyone or anything. Plus he doesn’t have Grant’s practiced sense of polished, eyebrow- raising irony. His deepish voice is pleasing but with a kind of twangy Midwestern flavornig, which, for me, significantly reduces the would-be air of sophistication.
I don’t know why I’m going on about this — he and Grant are fairly different ducks who don’t even swim in the same pond. Not to put down Clooney for who and what he seems to be. But Grant is world-class. I wonder, now that I think of it, if Grant would have been as big in movies if he had been born, say, in 1955 or there- abouts? Would his temperament and acting style have meshed with the ’80s, ’90s and afterwards, or was “Cary Grant” a manifestation that could only have been shaped and refined and taken flight in the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s?

I somehow missed hearing that the MPAA gave Once an R rating for “a handful of swear words.” I’m staggered, open-mouthed, agog. This has to be one of the most moronic calls in that organization’s history, and that’s obviously saying something.

“It may be a bit, um, premature to say so, but Judd Apatow‘s Knocked Up strikes me as an instant classic,” N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott wrote yesterday, calling it “a comedy that captures the sexual confusion and moral ambivalence of our moment without straining, pandering or preaching.”
No straining, that is, except for that believability issue that I wrote about twice and was shouted down for from every corner of the globe. I’m speaking (for the third and last time, I swear) about a mature, well-employed hottie who looks like Katherine Heigl going for a drunken one-night-stand with a layabout who looks like Seth Rogen. Wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen..absolutely no way in hell. But everyone’s loving the movie so the issue is moot. I enjoyed and respected this film a great deal, but I couldn’t let it go. I tried to push it away but it kept poking me in the ribs and breathing in my face.
“Like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, it attaches dirty humor to a basically upright premise,” Scott continues. “While this movie’s barrage of gynecology-inspired jokes would have driven the prudes at the old Hays Office mad, its story, about a young man trying to do what used to be the very definition of the Right Thing, might equally have brought a smile of approval to the lips of the starchiest old-Hollywood censor.”
“The wonder of Knocked Up is that it never scolds or sneers. It is sharp but not mean, sweet but not soft, and for all its rowdy obscenity it rarely feels coarse or crude. What it does feel is honest: about love, about sex, and above all about the built-in discrepancies between what men and women expect from each other and what they are likely to get.”

“Unfortunately, the good folks at Warner Brothers [Home Video] didn’t tax themselves with the most stellar print transfer” of the new double-disc DVD of Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City. “The anamorphic widescreen picture is of uneven quality. Nighttime and darkly lit scenes tend to have grain, and images are often soft.” — from Phil Bacharach‘s review on DVD Talk. If true, this is a shocker. The WB team has done such fine restorative work on other older titles in recent years. Could they have possibly just bonked this one out without giving it any extra effort? Opinions?

After a good eleven or twelve years of trying, Diane English will begin shooting her remake of George Cukor‘s The Women in early August. Picturehouse, a partial financier, will distribute it sometime next year — probably in the fall, I would guess. Variety‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that the costars are likely to be Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith, Debra Messing and Candice Bergen. This cast would have felt right maybe six, seven years ago…but not now, sorry to say. Ryan is over — is there anyone who disputes this? — in part because of those collagen-balloon lips she paid for three of four years ago. If the lips are repaired (i.e., de-ballooned), there’s a chance she won’t get in the way of English’s film working out. If not, forget it.